Delivering on its stated commitment to the traditional desktop application developer, Microsoft's S. Somasegar announced the releases during his keynote at the launch event on September 12. These releases of VS Express join the previously announcedVisual Studio Express for Web and Visual Studio Express for Windows 8.

Express for Windows Desktop will provide developers the ability to develop traditional Windows applications using C#, Visual Basic .NET, and C++. Despite previous concerns, developers will continue to have a way to develop for the platform with Visual Studio at no charge. This release facilitates the same project types available in Visual Studio 2010 Express, including WinForms, WPF, Console, and Class Libraries.

Beyond project types, this release includes Microsoft's unit testing framework, code analysis, and integration with Team Foundation Server Express 2012 and the Team Foundation Service. The NuGet package manager is included to organize third-party libraries and dependencies.

The F# product is being released as a free add-in for Visual Studio Express 2012 for Web. As described by the F Sharp Team, Microsoft's Web Platform Installer is a simple way to obtain all the tools needed to begin F# 3.0 development.